California Split (1974)

August 8, 1974

California Split' Deals Winning Hand

By VINCENT CANBY

Published: August 8, 1974

Robert Altman's "California Split," which opened yesterday at the Cinema I, is a fascinating, vivid movie, not quite comparable to any other movie that I can immediately think of. Nor is it easily categorized.

It's the story of several weeks in the lives of two compulsive gamblers who meet in a Los Angeles poker parlor and become fast friends, more or less as a result of being jointly mugged in a parking lot.

Charlie Waters (Elliott Gould) is your classic little league bettor, debonaire and incurably sloppy, existing happily on the brink of small-scale financial disaster. More to have company than because of emotional involvement, he sleeps in the apartment of two sweet, pretty Los Angeles girls who probably would be serious hookers if they had any ambition.

Bill Denny (George Segal) is another kind of gambler. He's an upper middle-class fellow (a magazine editor) whose compulsion appears to be well on the way to wrecking his life. He's separated from his wife, in debt to his bookie and, in the course of the film, ready to sell everything he has—camera, tape-recorder, car and real estate—in order to get the stake he needs to play poker with the big boys at the casino in Reno.

Like Charlie Waters and Bill Denny, "California Split" spends a great deal of its time in poker parlors, at race tracks, in casinos and barrooms, mostly seedy places, smoky, overcrowded, either much too bright or dark as tombs. The sounds of these places — the voices of the croupiers, gamblers and hangers-on, and the songs of Phyllis Shotwell who belts out boozy ballads at a piano bar—are never long from the soundtrack. Even when Charlie and Bill go into the straight world, these sounds follow them.

Mr. Altman has been quoted as saying that "California Split" is "a celebration of gambling," which is, I think, to underrate it, at least so it seems to someone who is not a gambling nut. The director, his screenwriter Joseph Walsh and the actors have created a movie of so many associations that it's impossible not to see "California Split" as something much more complex and disturbing.

Most of the gambling here doesn't really look like much fun. It's as desperate as the woman at the track who furiously throws her pocketbook and several oranges at Elliott Gould because he's touted her off a winner.

"California Split" is sometimes very funny, but the world it depicts is as bleak as a landscape composed entirely of used-car lots. The present tense for everyone in the film is grim. The clocks are out of sync. A character has Fruit Loops and beer for breakfast. Someone says of a poker game: "It just got started yesterday."

All hopes are pinned on tomorrow. Even those of the two would-be hookers (marvelously well played by Ann Prentiss and Gwen Welles), who have been promised a trip to Hawaii by a couple of otherwise unpromising johns. For the two gamblers, tomorrow is another visit to the track, another game. In the meantime one bets the other that he can't name all seven dwarfs.

Like all Altman films, "California Split" is dense with fine, idiosyncratic detail, a lot of which is supplied by Mr. Gould and Mr. Segal as well as by members of the excellent supporting cast. Bert Remsen, who was the aging bank robber in "Thieves Like Us," apears briefly and hilariously as a fearful old transvestite much like Scobie, the ex-seaman who became a Muslim saint in Lawrence Durrell's "Justine" novels.

Up to a certain point, "California Split" is, I suppose, a celebration of gambling. It's a movie that avoids as much as possible any simplified Freudian explanations. I say up to a point, because the ending has the effect of making us think back over everything we've seen earlier. To win at poker or anything else can sometimes be as devastating as losing.

The compulsive gambler will put up with any loss or indignity in the hope of recouping later, thus placing a terrible burden on the future. For once he does win, everything is over.